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Citizenship pipedreams

Friday, May 26th, 2006

By autum of next year, I will have lived in Great Britain for twenty years and been married for nineteen of them.

Every now and then, my thoughts turn to adopting British citizenship—particularly with view of any future possible medical emergencies abroad when I’d rather have the British embassy contacted and my husband informed as soon as possible.

Two hurdles have stood in the way for me adopting British citizenship. The first (swearing allegiance to the queen) has recently been softened to the extent that it is acceptable to my political beliefs. The second (reform of the unbelievably finicky German citizenship laws) looked to happen back in the year 2000. Unfortunately, the process stalled. It is still not possible for someone like myself to retain German citizenship. I’m not the only one to be frustrated by this.

Ironically, this is because I cannot prove any remaining strong connections to the country of my birth. I don’t have any property, and I no longer talk to my remaining relatives there.

This means that I can keep my German passport by right of birth but will have to surrender it should I decide to become British. And as I still have an accent thick enough for people to think I’m here on holiday (thanks, German English teachers!), I simply can’t do that. It feels fake.

I’m both—British and Geman. But the German government with their DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES attitude makes a rational approach to dual citizenship impossible.

It doesn’t bother me most of the time. But I don’t want to get into another situation like the one in Bangkok. Hopefully, increased globalisation will make the traveller’s live easier in the future. After all, my insurers were Australian. But I’m not going there right now.

PS If there’s any more comment spam, I’ll have to close this entry for comments, no offense. (It’s open for now.)

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Current State of Affairs

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

It’s gone quiet on this blog, I know. I simply don’t feel like writing up my Indonesia experiences at the moment.

There have been some developments on the insurance claim. At long last, the Internal Dispute Resolution Committee is looking at it. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the managing director of WN began posting on the Bootsnall thread. Thankfully, someone replied before I saw the message. There is no need to engage in a flame war, certainly not on the BNA members’ forum. Instead I’m slugging it out with the guy by email. And he doesn’t let go.

I’m not so much annoyed by this as (I’ve found to my considerable annoyance)…anxious. My heart starts beating wildly every time a new message from the guy pops up in my inbox. I hate palpitations, but apparently Insurance claims are another addition to my list of triggers. Unsurprisingly perhaps, seeing that the event has started off my current bout of panic disorder (the first attack happened right in that police station in Makassar, and it wasn’t pretty).

It’s time for another tobacco run. John will be away for a week from May 14th and I don’t think I should stay at home. I’m not getting any sort of writing done anyway. John says I can go where I want (within reason—not back to Thailand), even whalewatching in the Bay of Biscay if I wanted. But I don’t feel like going on my own on a ship, or spend my evenings in the company of drunken scousers. Besides, it is still a little early in the year. So thought about Prague. Not only is the beautiful city in the heart of Bohemia one of the coolest places on the planet, with some great hostels, but May is the perfect time to visit. Only problem: I can’t (yet) take the EU allowance of tobacco out of Czecheslovakia, just the duty free. That won’t pay for the flight. And do I really want to hang out in a foreign town on my own? It sounds like Xanax time again.

So for now, no new travel plans aside from a possible visit to Morocco for Eid which falls on New Year’s Eve. That would be cool! In the meantime, I’m trying to get John to renew his passport because, Brits take note, from October onwards first-time passport applicants will be interviewed for inclusion in the ID database and passport renewals will follow very soon after. Renewing your passport ASAP buys ten years of relative freedom.

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US shipping

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

BTW, having a really ancient, out-dated PDA such as the Palm m125 can have its advantages.

I just saw the PalmPak ebook series SciFi edition on offer at Amazon.com for a mere 88 cents (and that is for a pre-loaded SD card). Even if shipping is going to be about 12 bucks, that is definitely worth it. This little beauty contains the Peter F. Hamiltorn trilogy: ‘The Reality Dysfunction’, ‘The Neutronium Alchemist’ and ‘The Naked God’ (each of which are longer than ‘War and Peace’) plus ‘Second Chance at Eden’. In short: enough reading material for an entire RTW trip.

But guess what? ‘Geographical restrictions apply’. Amazon will ship to prisons, but not to the colonies (in case the SD card gets subverted by fundamentalist terrorists, no doubt). So no ebook for me, unless I come and get it myself 🙁

I rather go to Thailand any day.

PS I’m about to book my flights: SE Asia here we come! After a few days on the tourist trail to sort out visas, meds etc, I hope to aim straight for the Moluccas and Sulawesi. Wheeee!

PPS The postman just rung (again). He handed me a box which contained an empty 6 pint milk container, 2 bath sponges, a sawn-off fruit carton, a crunched-up plastic bag and, nestled securely among it all, my Dell Latitude C 600 laptop with floppy drive and wireless LAN card! Ebay rocks!

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London scoops Olympic bid

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

Ohmygod! —Should I laugh or should I cry… Great promises have been made to the denizens of the neglected wastelands of East London, but I can already see the greed glinting in people’s eyes. I guess we can forget about ever moving back now. But on the upside, on Friday we’ll be in the Ghetto for a good, old get-together (nothing to do with the olympics), so enjoy while we can…

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G8 rant

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

What is the matter with the G8 protesters? Don’t they know where Gleneagles is? Now they are rioting in Stirling of all places. Doubtlessly, they have made Sheriff Wyllie Robertson’s day—finally he gets to fill up his jails—but some of them will be in for a shock, for the wheels of justice grind slowly in Stirling…
[read on]

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How American are you?

Sunday, July 3rd, 2005

Not very, but apparently still more so than some…

You Are 23% American
You’re as American as Key Lime Tofu Pie
Otherwise known as un-American!
You belong in Cairo or Paris…
Get out fast – before you end up in Gitmo!
How American Are You?

This relatively high rating must stem from me saying that America is ‘up there’ with the best countries in the world, and I stand by that: the US is spectacular and varied and I want to visit there again soon. But I don’t want to be ‘an American’.

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Guts no Gusto

Friday, June 24th, 2005

John has said that he doesn’t like chitlings. I don’t get it. Sure, the dish wasn’t as delicate as the one we had in Taiwan, but it wasn’t cooked wrong—that is the way they taste! But if it means an end to Gonzo cooking for now that’s fine with me, it was getting a little tiresome. With the sun finally out, it is a time for quiche and salads and we’ll have pizza tonight. However, this is still England: plans for a weekend BBQ are on hold as grey clouds are starting to gather.
[read on]

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Dreams

Thursday, June 23rd, 2005

The loss of The Nervous Breakdown Manual is extremely upsetting. Over the past five months it has been a therapeutical tool with which I have tried to understand what happened in the 3½ years between April 2001 and the end of 2004. I have tried to reconstruct events of which I have only a limited memory but which were life-changing (and not for the better). Only by following up these events will I be able to accept the consequences in the long term. The NBM has helped me to deal with the on-going repercussions—until now, when they may reach their final conclusion or open up another avenue of lost fights and bitter disappointment.
[read on]

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How are we led astray? or: The R&D Game

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005

You have an idea, formulate a hypothesis and write a grant proposal. Because you have to sell yourself (the timid don’t get funding) you make great predictions. Pharma latches onto it because it sounds promising (“Wow, if that is true, then we get this!”—with a very small ‘if’). The first results are not discouraging and soon get spun into something encouraging. You continue to build the castle in the air: stronger compounds now get roped in for development until the whole thing blows up leaving everybody with egg on their face. Why? Because the right question was never asked. People mistake hypotheses for textbook truths and with pressure from shareholders or short-term grants, further indications are not followed up. Nobody knows what really causes depression. No one, not even a Nobel Prize winner. Nobody has asked the right question and so people have tried to cure a disease which they don’t understand. As someone once said: It is like taking antacids for stomach cancers. Or aspirin for the flu. Only more damaging for some.

Science is about the art of asking the right questions—or should be.

Dangerous game? Sure thing, R&D is a high-risk business. Most of their stuff doesn’t work out, so the little that does has to prop up the entire industry megalith.

And the regulators? It takes high-level experts to understand this stuff. The majority of these will have some industry involvement. They get to review selected reports, not the raw data. The only way around this is to demand openness at source which some journals now start to do: future studies have to be registered with the journal to which they will be submitted for review and all data will have to be made available on line (that is revolutionary and it will make everybody’s lives easier, including that of the researchers shredding their nails during these studies—no more secrets!)

I have a phone appointment with my lawyer in 15 minutes. It made me reflect on my career and the games we all played, in another life. The Nervous Breakdown Manual has been taken offline (censorship?) I’m cross-posting this here because I need to get this off my chest.

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Colours and Culture

Sunday, May 29th, 2005

How is this for a travel-related research project? Paul Kay from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkley, California examined data from no fewer than 110 different cultures around the world, all with unwritten languages. Representatives from each were asked to identify the truest hues from a palette of 330 different colours. It turns out that our perception of colour is universial with nearly everyone choosing the same hue for the ‘truest’ red or blue
(New Scientist, 28th May p. 17)

Sadly, rather than travel the world, Kay and his team were confined to the lab for their analysis, using data collected during the World Color survey which was initiated in the seventies.

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